83 – Vanessa DeLeon: Reality TV Designing Star

Vanessa DeLeon: Reality TV Designing Star

Joining me today in the lounge is my new friend Vanessa DeLeon, an interior designer based out of New York. A featured designer on the hit shows Restaurant Impossible-The Food Network, HGTV’s Generation Renovation, Designer Challenge, Bang for your Buck, Design Star, DIY’s Rev Run’s Renovation, Ice Loves Coco, and Bravo’s Million Dollar Listing. She has made guest appearances on The Better Show, NBC’s Today Show, and is a contributing designer for Open House NYC. Vanessa had a segment on PIX 11 “Vanessa to the Rescue” and was a featured host and designer for You Tube’s Channel Spaces TV ” Your Place is a Deal Breaker”.

In my normal fashion, I start our conversation asking Vanessa how she got into interior design, where she tells be about growing up in her family’s furniture business. No doubt this is where she learned her love for interior spaces and her drive to work hard. From there we talk about her experiences on numerous designer reality shows and the resulting effects on her interior design firm.

One of the biggest themes that came out of talking with Vanessa is how hard it is to build an interior design firm. From the outset, a lot of people could look at her and determine that it is a lot of luck and good fortune. In reality, if Vanessa had not shown up each day to figure out how to leverage each opportunity and maximize her exposure, she would not be sitting on a successful design business. To balance out her abilities and her time, she had to find someone that would be present and action on her design vision on her projects. Vanessa talked about finding that person in her right hand project manager Tim Davis. As the business owners, we need to find those people that compliment and can do the things that we either do not like doing, or that we are not as skilled at. Vanessa shared that she does not like to deal with the production side of things. From my point of view, if she didn’t have a competent project manager, her company would not be as successful.

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